Bowles, Simpson have overstayed their welcome

Commentary: Their zombie deficit plan should rest in peace

Erskine Bowles, left, and Alan Simpson have enjoyed a second career, earning big bucks by scolding Americans about deficits.

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson now reportedly make up to $40,000 an appearance in their road show touting the measures they cooked up two years ago in their failed presidential commission to reduce the deficit.

That fee for an hour or so of political harangue on debt is, as economist Dean Baker recently pointed out, more than the typical worker earns in a year and almost three times the average annual Social Security benefit.

“The two of them are running around the country telling people that Social Security checks to retirees that average $15,000 a year and providing health-care insurance to seniors who have spent their lives working will have our children and grandchildren living in poverty,” wrote Baker, who is the co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research. Read Baker’s op-ed.

Bowles, a former chief of staff for President Bill Clinton, and Simpson, a former three-term Republican senator from Wyoming, had little enough credibility when they failed in 2010 to win sufficient backing from the bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform that they co-chaired for their plan to magically reduce the deficit by cutting both taxes and spending. Read more about the commission.

As a result, the plan did not get the endorsement of President Barack Obama or an up-or-down vote in Congress. Obama wisely patted them on the back and put their report in a drawer, where it should have stayed.

Instead, the Bowles-Simpson plan has been resurrected from the dead and is stalking the country once again. The two former co-chairmen, with underwriting from the ubiquitous deficit scold Peter Peterson, have embarked on a speaking tour to tilt the fiscal discussion in favor of their plan to reduce the deficit by cutting “entitlements” and, yes, fulfilling Peterson’s dreams of lowering taxes.

The country, however, has moved on. The election last month certified that American voters would prefer to see taxes go up rather than to cut Social Security and Medicare.

But that doesn’t stop Bowles and Simpson, who, the New York Times recently reported, are crisscrossing the country on their mission, collecting these huge fees along the way. Read the report in the Times.

CEPR’s Baker calls the tour a “traveling circus,” branding the two men as “hucksters.” The Times is not much more flattering, describing it as a “buddy act” and referring to Bowles as the “straight man” and Simpson as his “corny sidekick.”

It was astounding at the time that a Democratic president would appoint a strident debt hawk like Simpson to chair any panel pretending to bipartisanship or objectivity. It was Simpson, let us not forget, who described Social Security as “a milk cow with 310 million tits,” ignoring the fact that Americans contribute a significant chunk of each paycheck for this “entitlement.”

For his part, Bowles, who is often described as a “centrist” in a political spectrum where the “center” is to the right of Dwight Eisenhower, has a background in business and Wall Street that hardly makes him a counterweight to Simpson.

WSJ poll: Strike fiscal cliff deal now

(6:23)

A month after the presidential election highlighted divisions over taxes and spending, Americans now solidly back compromise to solve the biggest budget challenges facing the country. Neil King reports on Markets Hub. Photo: Reuters.

Bowles failed twice in his efforts to win a Senate seat in North Carolina, including his 2004 bid to replace retiring Democrat John Edwards in a year when Democrat Mike Easley won re-election as governor and his party regained control of both houses of the state Legislature.

The Bowles-Simpson commission was created by executive order in February 2010 and the final plan of the co-chairmen was put to a vote on Dec. 3 of that year, winning support from 11 of the 18 commissioners, short of the supermajority of 14 needed to advance it to Congress.

The Bowles-Simpson plan did not become a benchmark for Congress then and has even less relevance now as one.

Congress surely has sufficient political talent that it does not need to rely on a plan concocted by a lawmaker who retired in 1997 and a former investment banker who never succeeded in gaining elective office.

It’s time for the discussion to move on from Bowles-Simpson and to consign their ill-fated plan to its proper place as a footnote in an unhappy chapter of legislative history.

And it may be time for those two gentlemen to return to the enjoyment of their retirement. After all, even if they forgo the $40,000 speaking fee, they are not likely, in contrast to millions of their fellow citizens, to be living on that over-generous Social Security payment from the federal government.

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